So I've been reading a bunch of posts here and participating in some threads. I see some mistakes come up over and over again. Not from the terrible players and not from the really good ones, but ones who are good enough to make a small profit or break even at 25NL or 50NL by bumhunting.

1) they are lousy hand readers. They don't bother putting villains on preflop ranges. If you get involved in a hand, you need to see your opponent's range in your head just as clearly as you have your own two cards on your screen. And you need to do this starting from preflop. It's not easy because ranges are the widest, but you can't even play effective preflop much less postflop unless you can range villains. And there are a lot of ranges. Opens vs calls. Limps vs raises. UTG vs BTN. You can't plan your attack if you are flying blind.

2) they don't bluff enough. When micro players first start playing, they are taught to never bluff because villains are loose. This is probably true at 2 and 5NL, but once you get to 10NL, you need to balance your 3bet and sometimes even 4 bet ranges. The unwillingness to do so is the reason this forum is always advocating passive nittiness. I was just reading a thread where people were insisting that the proper way to play AK in the blinds vs a CO open is by flatting because you don't want to fold out worse. This is a horrid way to play AK and this line of thinking comes around because people don't want to 3bet bluff vs a CO open and instead play these hands passively in the hopes of maybe snapping off a Cbet.
And this applies to postflop. People need to bluff more with things like BDFDs and gutshots. Probably the weakest bluff you'll see other than Cbets is something like an A high FD. Balancing sets with monster draws isn't balancing at all. Your opponents will be absolutely correct to fold to your so-called bluffs.
But NLHE is a game of aggression. Not the passive nitfest that you see advocated all the time here. We all learned early on that the best way to exploit nits is to bluff them, but for some reason people want to try and outnit them.
How do you get past this? They best way to start is to come up with a hand chart. We all used them at one point when we were learning. Now you are learning something new. Which hands are you going to bluff with preflop? Make a chart and stick to it. What are good hands to bluff with? I'll leave that to you. Different people have different opinions. Some hands are better than others, but the important thing is to do it. I like the chart approach since it forces you to stick to a game plan and also, it prevents you from going too nuts (because you will start going nuts when you find out how well this works) And the best part of all this is that you will start getting action for your monsters. It's actually quite amazing how quickly this happens. I've seen the nittiest players stack off against me with hands like pocket 10s and KJ. And you don't have to be a perfectly balanced player, but you simply cannot expect to win if you become passive with everything short of rockets. And you cannot expect to win if you simply wait for sets. In this day and age, you must, must be comfortable with bluffing. Not as something you do once in a while, but as routine.

3) I'm not sure if this is necessarily a leak or just good exploitative play, but I think micro players fold too much. Maybe folding to 3bets is ok since villains do it so infrequently. But I think the three biggest areas for overfolding are 1) facing a blind steal, 2) getting your own steals 3bet, and 3) facing a cbet. We all know that these are the loosest bets we face, micro players will defend against them relatively lightly, but people don't defend as wide as they need to. If you open on the BTN to 3BB and get 3bet to 10BB by the BB who is an aggressive restealer, how wide are you defending your open? The right frequency is something like 35-40% if you want to prevent villain from printing money with his bluffs. Most people won't do that. Now suppose you are HU to the flop. Villain cbets 2/3 pot. How often are you defending the cbet? If you aren't defending against the cbet 60% of the time, your opponent is printing money with his cbet bluffs. Now this is less of a leak than the first two since villains' betting ranges are relatively tight, but not defending in those areas is probably a leak. If you open AQ UTG and get 3bet by MP1, then it's fine to toss your hand, but it's different for those three areas. I know people say don't worry about blind defense. Just make up for it by stealing blinds yourself. But if you can do both, that's more money in your pocket. Ask the Knicks how well playing great offense and ignoring defense worked out for them.

This isn't easy stuff, but it's also not THAT hard. And if you can hand read, balance, and defend, you will be miles ahead of your fellow micro stakes players. But you're going to suck at this. The nice thing about TAGing through the 5NL fish is that you saw an instant payoff. Not so with these. So move down. Save some money. Give yourself a lot of BI to play with. You're going to have bluffs picked off, you're going to make bad decisions, you'll make good decisions with bad outcomes. You're going to get into trickier postflop spots.

Extra reading for those that got through this
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/78...ration-403010/ - the first COTW and in my mind, the most important.

http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/show...=0#Post8629256 - Pokey's guide to hand reading. Maybe a little less important with pokerstove, but it's good.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/78...zation-802045/ - Split's guide to polarization. This was also a huge eye-opener for me.

Read, discuss. These are my own observations and my evolution through the game. But I am not a great poker player and I haven't played online in three months now. So everything is up for debate and discussion.

Enjoy.

First?

Thanks man

Good read, thanks.

Nice one Thanks

Great stuff, thanks

Nice, thank you

Interesting reading! Thank you DDAWD

Good read man

Solid cotw man, nice to see when your running bad but making the right adjustments to your game!

Nice, thanks.......but more thanks for the usual mis-application that will inevitably arise out of a post like this as hordes of 25nl nits suddenly turn into stations for a week before realising they suck and go back to 10/6'ing.

Made for an interesting read.

Just a couple of quick points. Im not sure i agree on people at the micros folding too much, from what i have seen and see it always seems to be the opposite where by people call too much. Especially with weak hands against people percieved ranges.

Im not sure i agree either with the hand chart idea. The first thing i would do after spending an hour making a hand chart is tear it up and bin it. People need to study their opponents and work our ways to exploit them individually rather than trying to exploit them as a group. You could take 2 12/10 nits and different plays will work against them where making the same default play against them would be pretty bad.

Third and last i promise, i think i was part of the AK discussion you mentioned and from what i remember the call pre was very villain specific in that he folded to 3bets a high amount of the time.

I think the biggest advice i can give to micro players is to get out of the `auto` and `standard` mindsets. Nothing in this game is standard. Every decision you make at the table you should be asking yourself what are my options here, what happens if i do A or what happens if i do B. If you dont have time to do that then you are playing too many tables. It wasnt until i started coaching with nutedawg that i actually started thinking `outside the box`. What if i min bet here, what if i overbet there, every option should be considered before it is dismissed.

Carrying on from this disscusion about bluffing and such i think a great way to think about it is to put yourselve in the villains shoes and think about things like what would i do in this spot if i had XX or part of your range and my opponent raised, how would that make me feel, would i have to fold? If it makes you feel uncomfortable or makes you think you would fold, well you probably just found yourself a good bluffing spot. Flipping the roles can be a great tool to help yourself.

Again nice read and should create some interesting discussion.

Hand charts are a fine way to learn a new skill. But if you're introducing someone to poker, you don't plop him down at a seat and tell him to start exploiting people. You give him a hand chart. If after playing for several months he still follows it unwaveringly, then there's a problem, but you can't learn to exploit your opponents without some semblance of instruction in fundamentals.

Most people here have internalized their opening ranges to where they don't think about it. They are really comfortable with that aspect of the game, so they can waver from it as the situation calls for it. People just don't have the same comfort with bluff ranges. Yeah, everyone three bets light once in a while, but it's a tool people keep at the back of the toolshed. Not out front where it needs to be. The reason for this is that people feel uncomfortable with it. And the reason people feel uncomfortable with it is that they don't do it enough. If people start trying to pick up a new skill without some kind of plan for learning it, they will fail. The point of the hand chart isn't to have a piece of paper to follow dogmatically for the rest of their lives. It's to force them to start bluffing with some regularity.

And the whole idea of not having a standard line is one of those things which I guess sounds good, but no one does it. Everyone has a standard line. People waver from those standard lines, but everyone has them. Thinking through de novo what to do every time you get 3To UTG is a massive waste of time.

And that's kind of the point on bluffing and hand charts. That bluffing should become a standard move, not just something you do once in a while when you feel especially sneaky. I feel the hand chart is the best way to learn to make bluffing more standard. Once players internalize the standard, you can start making non-standard plays. You can't do this in reverse.

haha, that's always the hope.

This style of play will take some work to get good at, so those who don't put in the off-table work will get punished.

Thanks. I really started to try and figure this out like the third time I moved up to 50NL. I had some run bad, but what was really getting to me was the fact that I was getting no action from my monsters. I knew this meant I had to start bluffing more, but learning this is a pretty scary skill. We're taught never to bluff, so throwing that out the window doesn't come naturally.